Abstract
BackgroundHealth education programs (HEPs) have been documented to increase individuals’ awareness toward their health and improve health outcomes. Given the reported poor health seeking behavior among men in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs), it is crucial for HEPs to be targeted toward men in order to improve health outcomes. Here, we outline a protocol for a scoping review aimed at mapping literature on HEPs for men in LMICs in order to reveal gaps to guide future research and practice.MethodsWe will conduct a scoping review with guidance from the Arksey and O’Malley framework (Journal of Social Research Methodology 8(1):19–32, 2005), further enhanced by Levac et al. (Implementation Science 5(1):69, 2010). We will conduct a comprehensive keyword search for relevant studies presenting evidence on HEP for men in LMICs from PubMed, Google Scholar, EBSCOhost, and WEB of Science databases. In addition, we will search for relevant gray literature, dissertations, and theses from university repositories as well as international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO). We will include articles reporting evidence on health education programs for men in LMICs and published between January 2000 and March 2019. We will employ NVIVO version 12 software package to extract the relevant outcomes from the included articles using content thematic analysis. We will conduct quality appraisal of the included articles using the mixed methods appraisal tool (MMAT) 2018 version.DiscussionWe anticipate to find relevant studies reporting on health education programs for men in LMICs. The findings of this review will guide further implementation research on health education programs for men in LMICs. The results of the proposed scoping review will be disseminated electronically, in print, and through conference presentation as well as key stakeholder meetings.
Highlights
Health education programs (HEPs) have been documented to increase individuals’ awareness toward their health and improve health outcomes
It is anticipated that findings from this study enable the researchers to identify gaps in the subject matter and guide future research to bridge the gaps toward improved health outcomes for men in lowto middle-income countries (LMICs)
Type of health education program carried out Charting the data We developed a data charting form for extracting relevant data to characterize included studies (Table 3)
Summary
Health education programs (HEPs) have been documented to increase individuals’ awareness toward their health and improve health outcomes. Literature on the social determinants of health and men’s poorer survival rates reflect several factors contributing toward low life expectancy, which include behavior associated with male norms of risk-taking and paradigms related to (2020) 9:5 keeping people alive by providing valued services to populations, information on combating various diseases and promoting health awareness [11]. Gender-specific strategies for care delivery, health education, and research are key to achieving these goals, in disease-burdened LMICs [9, 13,14,15]. A 2007 World Health Organization (WHO) review of interventions designed to involve men and boys in achieving gender equality and better health concluded that well-designed male involvement interventions would be more effective at improving men’s attitudes and behaviors toward sexual and reproductive health and other health conditions [16]. Progress toward engaging men in participation in health programs has been slow [17]
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